It's my first night sleeping horizontally after only sleeping sitting up for the last three nights. The hostel is everything you would imagine a backpacker hostel to be: the washrooms are filthy, the rooms are terribly smelly and the bunk beds that have been nailed together only have a creepy blanket with sheets. But you just have to lower your own standards far enough to spend a restful night here too. At least there is muesli for breakfast.
At noon I take part in a free city tour. They are available now almost everywhere in the world. The tour guides do a decent job and are funded by tips and here in Seattle (as I understand it) by city grants. Apparently that's enough for those guys to do that job.
Seattle owes its growth and prosperity to gold. Although gold has never really been mined here. But when the gold rush broke out in California in 1848, a construction boom began in San Francisco. After the forests around there were cleared for lumber, the forests around Seattle provided supplies. The logs were slid down the hillsides to the harbor where they were loaded onto ships to be transported by water to the boom towns of California.
Seattle became rich through the second gold rush on the Klondike in Alaska. The railroad had meanwhile grown from the eastern United States to the Pacific and Seattle was the terminus. Thousands of prospectors arrived in Seattle, this time to take the ship north to the Yukon Territory. But the Canadian government would only let them into the country if they were fully stocked with equipment and provisions. Because they did not want to achieve world fame through thousands of starved gold seekers. The soldiers of fortune now had to buy all of these supplies in Seattle at exorbitant prices. Very few actually found a significant amount of gold. But those who were successful often returned to Seattle and invested their newfound wealth there.
Seattle is named after the chiefs of the Suquamish and Duwamish, two Coast Salish tribes. He was an important orator, with many of his speeches only being remembered orally for 20 years before being transcribed by European immigrants in their language. But Chief Seattle pursued a strategy of assimilation to the whites, which was exploited by the those to the point that the indigenous culture almost died out. Today the number of speakers of the Indian languages is growing again and the place names are a reminder that the Europeans were not the first to give names to land, mountains and waters.
The city tour ends at the the piers, where the ships with the gold prospectors once left. The landings do not protrude from the shoreway into the sea at right angles, but at an angle that is due to the curve radius of the railway tracks. At that time, the trains rolled parallel onto the pier to load freight onto the ships and pick it up from there. For me, this place means above all that I have now arrived at the Pacific. It smells like the ocean. Exactly how it smelled three weeks ago when I started my journey on the Atlantic in Rhode Island. So I've now crossed the US overland!
